Thursday, June 30, 2011

I went shopping at Longs Drugs (CVS) in Moiliili, the one that moved into the former Star Supermarket building. Star Supermarket had been there for eons and it left a void in the neighborhood after Times bought out the Star Supermarket chain and decided to close the Moiliili branch and there's hasn't been a new tenant in the vacated space for a while. This Longs Drugs branch was located only 2 city blocks down the same street but it's that much closer for the University of Hawaii student's residing around the area just downhill from the Manoa campus. Plus the old location of the Moiliili Longs Drugs was across the street from Stadium Park, formerly Honolulu Stadium years back. The stoplight-less crosswalk that you cross to get to Longs Drugs from the Stadium Park side was about the dangerous crosswalk in town, so it's safer for pedestrians to cross the street at the new Longs Drugs location.

There's a drive-through pharmacy window on one side of the building which I've never seen before. Since Longs Drugs is open 24-hours, there's a Bank of Hawaii branch inside Longs, open 24-hours too. Who has money. Just thinking out loud. When I went outside I saw this local guy taking out his ukulele from what I surmise was a ukulele bag. It wasn't like a guitar case, it was cloth. Then he puts his pooch inside the bag with only the pooch's head sticking out taking in the world. Oh, the bag was inside a shopping cart and now the pooch is riding inside the shopping cart if you get the picture. I guess the owner thought that the store might object to someone pushing his pooch in a shopping cart through the aisles, however can't simply leave pooch tied up outside. The owner saw me looking at the situation as he passed by, said something incomprehensible, and we both laughed out loud simultaneously. Then no sooner had the owner and the pooch entered the front door, this older guy and his wife passes by with their pooch wearing a sleeveless jacket, of sorts. The only difference is that second pooch is riding with his paws up on the front of the shopping cart in plain sight. If only pooches could talk.

Friday, June 3, 2011

Happy Aloha Friday to you, if it is, a Happy Aloha Friday, if it ain't.

The case against former Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards brought up something that I was totally unaware of, that is, there is such a thing as an "intent law" versus an "non-intent law." For example, if you take off your pants, or skirt, and run pantless or skirtless around town with abandon, that would fall under the purview of breaking a non-intent law. You're guilty as is. You cannot claim that you suffer from bouts of poor memory and occasionally forget to put on pants or a skirt.

However, with the John Edwards' case, that's falls under intent laws. The prosecution has to establish the existence of "intent," specifically that he deliberately set out to break campaign spending laws. At issue is Edwards allowing $925,000 in hush money to be transferred to his mistress's bank account while he was running for vice president. Even if it is absolutely clear that hush money is not the way campaign funds should be legally spent, Edwards' defense is that he wasn't aware that the hush money would be classified as a campaign contribution. Two individuals donated the almost million dollars, almost half a million a piece, for whatever reasons, and as far as everybody knows, the money went straight to Edwards' mistress, not to Edwards' campaign chest, then re-routed to the mistress. Since obviously there is no question that the money wasn't meant for his campaign to be spent on tv ads, or to print out campaign signs to begin with, the mitigating circumstance is in Edwards' favor. Anyways, that's Edwards' non-intent defense in response to breaking an "intent law." Btw....why didn't multi-millionaire Edwards simply give his mistress a million dollars from his own bank account? The answer is that Edwards was afraid that his wife would have found out about the affair.

There's an online newspaper called Honolulu Civil Beat that I just found out about. It was started by Pierre Omidyar, founder/chairman of the eBay, who lives in Honolulu. They only focus on City and State legislation related stories for the moment. They've been in business for just over a year, but perhaps in the future, the Web paper will branch out into including more popular kind news too. Honolulu is a one newspaper town and another daily newspaper would be a welcomed addition even if it's in a non-paper format.